I think it's quite appropriate, regarding the fucked-up ownership of this team, that a Pirates game thread on a fan website is almost exclusively devoted to traffic impacts or the lack thereof in the area surrounding the ballpark, as opposed to anything about, you know, baseball. Because Nutting has certainly never given 2 shites about building an actual winning baseball team, so why should the fans? Glad they're finally staying away in droves.

PS. Bell really raking and sent a HR ball into the river. Too bad the Bucs' non-starting pitching sucks so hard that it didn't matter.

FWIW the Pirates are one of the few teams that have had an attendance jump this year. Bucs attendance is up more than 2000 per game over this time last year. The Phillies are the only team with a bigger increase.

_________________Neal Huntington on what he's been told by his bosses about $$$: "We've got assurances we're going to be able to continue to do what we've done."

I know everyone wants an update, so I'll tell you that traffic was absolutely abysmal. Took me 25 minutes to go less than the half mile to get on West End Bridge from my office.

Let's not do anymore mid-day games on weekdays, mmkay?

Friend, try SoCal sometime ... there are so many people now in California that the "rush hour" jam is almost perpetual. When I was a kid the freeways were quite speedy except maybe 7 to 9am and 4 to 6pm on weekdays --- but now every lane of almost every freeway crawls at 10mph or less, all day, every weekday from 6:30am without let-up until 8 or 9 at night, and even on the weekends, starting about 10 or 11am until well into the night. Even if there's no big events, no home Dodgers or Angels game, no concert --- doesn't matter --- just flat-out too many damn cars and not enough lanes to put them in. It truly sucks!

/rant ended (until the next cross-town drive -- thank God I work super close to home )